We’re just getting started with SourceTree
By Mike Minns on February 25, 2015Over the last few months, there have been a steady number of articles, tweets, etc. concerned about Atlassian’s commitment to continued investment in SourceTree. The apparent silence from our end hasn’t helped either. An update is long overdue.
Introducing myself
Many of you, who are followers of SourceTree, are used to seeing posts from Steve Streeting and Kieran Senior. So the most logical question is, who am I? My name is Michael Minns, and I joined the SourceTree team last October as a Team Lead.
I’ve been with Atlassian for a number of years. Prior to SourceTree, I spent my time working on cross-product Java libraries used in the integration of our products – JIRA, Stash, and Bamboo. One of the things I love about working at Atlassian is that we get to use the products we develop, every day. We get the same experience as our customers – an improvement for you means an improvement for us. It is most true in our developer tools team. So when the opportunity came to join the SourceTree team – it was a simple decision for me – not to mention the overlap with an abiding passion for .NET.
I’m excited to be working on a project that has such close contact with its customers. I love the passion you all show for SourceTree and your desire to see it improve continuously.
“Be the number one graphical Git client in the world”
The statement above is SourceTree’s BHAG a.k.a. our moonshot. While we know we are still quite far from it, I wanted to mention it to highlight our strong belief in the future of SourceTree.
While SourceTree has been loved here always at Atlassian, it is fair to say that the phenomenal growth in the number of users over the last year or so has surprised us greatly. Steve Streeting and Kieran Senior have done an incredible job of keeping SourceTree moving forward with new features and supporting our growing base of users, which has rocketed past 650,000 MAUs (monthly active users) in early 2015.
Maintaining the quality is not easy
Windows users of SourceTree are painfully aware of some of the quality and performance issues we’ve experienced since the 1.6 release and the introduction of the tree view back in October 2014. These are summarized in the (slightly notorious) issue – SRCTREEWIN-2093. We took our eyes off the ball and didn’t act quickly enough. The delay in getting the bugs fixed was compounded by the fact that the code base required major refactoring. We are currently working through the issues and while we still have a long way to go, the latest Windows release, v1.6.13, has turned a significant corner and put us back on the road to recovery.
We’re here for the long haul
It is true that Steve Streeting, SourceTree’s founding father, is no longer working directly on SourceTree. However, he is still here at Atlassian, to provide advice, opinion, guidance and that invaluable longer-term perspective to the team. Steve’s talent is a huge asset to Atlassian, and he is currently putting it to use by working on a super secret project that will be of great benefit to all Git and SourceTree users a bit further down the line.
In the meantime, SourceTree is receiving a lot of love from Atlassian. SourceTree is an integral part of our family of developer tools and will be receiving even more investment in the near future. With this renewed focus we will be able to keep moving forward – hiring new team members, adding features, improving integrations with other products and services, focusing more on the overall user experience and providing a stable and responsive application.
A huge thanks to the SourceTree community
We’re a product company and pride ourselves in building products you’ll love and help your team build better software. Your feedback helps us improve SourceTree, so keep reporting issues and potential improvements.
Be assured, we’re here for the long haul. We’re just getting started with SourceTree.
76 Comments
Keep it up! 🙂
Couldn’t work without SourceTree! Second to none IMO. Keep up the great work guys.
I would say it is second to the command line interface.
I beg to differ. Command line is great for quick commits etc, but when you only want to commit certain lines / hunks of code, Soucetree beats cli hands down.
Steve S. replaced by a Windows guy explains a lot. I’m not going to spend any (wasted) effort rehashing the long list of UI/UX and quality fumbles since release 1.9 for OSX. ST is good but it once was great, and on it’s current trajectory, I can’t see it becoming great again. I try every new ST release for OSX, but I always end up reverting back to 1.8.1.
The current 2.0 version is still worse than 1.8 but O.K.ish and an improvement over 1.9. Obviously we will not get 1.8 back and you can’t stick with it forever.
But I hope next up are not “shuffling the UI around and look busy” releases again. I would love to see some hard features, e.g. word highlighting as in https://github.com/blog/1885-better-word-highlighting-in-diffs
Steve S going is good news. Try the Windows client and you will so it’s had very little in the way of love compared to the Mac version.
Atlassian shouldn’t be showing platform bias, and they shouldn’t be allowing developers to spend all their time polishing thier pet platform, more so given the small mac marketshare.
SourceTree is free product, so I guess it’s up to Atlassian to decide what will be improved/fixed and which platform will get more love.
“Atlassian shouldn’t be showing platform bias” — oh? Why is that?
they shouldn’t be showing platform bias to a miniority operating system like Mac, and ignoring Windows. It’s called commercial suicide…
Heh. Do you mean to suggest that they could sell more $0 copies of SourceTree for Windows than $0 copies of SourceTree for Mac, and thus be more commercially successful?
Yeah, ST for Windows is complete garbage compared to the OS X one.
I’m Mac user and SourceTree for Mac has awesome UI. However on Windows SourceTree isn’t as great. Decision of combining bookmark window with repository view window wasn’t right one IMO.
Alexander, I’ve been trying to push them toward moving to the tabbed interface in OSX instead of a separate “Repository Browser” window. Is there any reason you wouldn’t want tabs in a single window on mac?
On MS Windows there is no easy way for moving (using keyboard only) between single application opened windows. On OSX there is (“Command+`”), so having separate windows for bookmarks and each repository is very convenient and keeps you focused on a single repository at a time without thinking about other repos opened in other tabs. Also closing single window is much easier (you can use system-wide window closing shortcut on Mac), then a tab (that would probably require some application specific shortcut).
The tabbed UI only is useful in IDEs/editors or browsers.
Isn’t that a simple matter of providing the right shortcuts?
Windows user speaking, I see. Unfortunately not.
MS Word doesn’t use tabs when you edit different documents. I bet there are reasons for that. I guess editing different repositories can be considered the same – different stuff = different windows.
I absolutely love SourceTree, you guys are doing great work.
linux version please? SourceTree is one of the few things I miss about developing on a Mac vs a linux box.
A Linux version would be nice, but with the focus on the .NET Windows version it’s unlikely. There is always the option of running that under Wine though.
Perhaps having the Windows version compiled with libwine would be an option?
Your comment makes me sad but I agree about it being unlikely since it’s a free product and most linux devs currently hate GUIs. This probably won’t change unless there’s some mass migration from OSX to Ubuntu. Hopefully we’re wrong.
What’s sad is that I would actually pay for a git / mercurial GUI this polished for linux. As of now there’s not much in terms of GUI options of linux.
No, wine isn’t an option because I barely have enough time as is to program let alone tinker with something that’s not native that’s bound to have annoying quirks with wine.
Gnome-Shell says you’re wrong about linux developers hating GUIs.
I’ve been using linux for the last nine years, not once have I opted to develop code using vi or vim (or even nano).
I preferred Gedit (writing my own plugins), then switched to SublimeText.
You may be confusing the desire for any GUI workflow to also be available as a CLI workflow to mean “most linux devs hate GUIs”.
In reality what a seasoned linux developer wants is for ideas to easily be transcoded into the language they use, but tooling to be modular and scriptable from open, free, standard amd established toolkits (bash, git, ssh, docker, etc).
I certainly do not want my deployment workflow to involve clicking “next > next > next > next > next. yes. yes i’m sure”.
I certainly do want most, if not all my software to be installable through scripting, allowing me to dockerise pretty much anything.
Well then why do most Linux GUI apps suck compared to either the Windows or OSX app ecosystem?
If you’re willing to pay, SmartGit is a good option, works well in all OSes. If you’re not, I’ve gotten Git Cola to work very well (with some tweaking).
On mac you should be using GitUp really!
Keep up the good work.
I understand why it hasn’t been done yet, but a Linux version would make my day. Nothing I’ve used on Linux compares.
I’ve upvoted the comments below requesting a Linux port.
Along the same lines, I’d be interested in a blog article describing the current status of development for the two platforms you do support. How much code is shared between the implementations? Is the use of .NET for the Windows version and (presumably) Cocoa for the Mac version cleanly separated as a presentation layer? If not, then is that the reason why you don’t want to choose yet another UI framework for a Linux port? etc.
Thank you for the amazing tool, guys. I use it every day for last two years and I’m not quite sure how I lived without it before.
I hope that with your appointment there will now be some thoughtful and user-focused consideration put into the Mac OS SourceTree UI. I’m still one of the many using 1.8.x because of the crappy usability regressions introduced in the post-1.8 versions.
Also, I believe you misspelled your colleague’s name in the second paragraph.
I really wish Sourcetree had built in Gitlab support (as it does for Bitbucket and Github). As much as I’d love to simply use one of the already supported services, fact is, I have to work with Gitlab pretty frequently.
Any plans to make Source Tree open source? Guess the community would help with a Linux portz
Would be great SourceTree for Linux… It would cover an important lack…
My biggest problem is the number of times a day we all have to close Sourcetree and restart it, due it just giving up responding to git stuff under it’s UI.
There are loads of JIRAs for it, and it’s obvious it only affects certain development scenarios due if you are affected, it’s unusable. We have a very large C++ project, and when it’s compiling, if you try to do ANYTHING with sourcetree, its going to crap out, due to the number of file changes that’s occuring under ignored obj and temp directories within the git workspace.
SRCTREEWIN-760
SRCTREEWIN-1355
SRCTREEWIN-1366
There was talk of only Sourecetree only listening for file changes in directories that aren’t ignored, and this would go along way to fixing our problems, but so far it’s been pretty much ignored by Atlassian, with comments like “it’s not out fault that files are changing in the repositry”. I would disagree, it’s YOUR product, take ownership of the problem.
This problem affects all 30+ developers here.
We feel as Windows Sourcetree users, we are the ugly sister that’s pretty much forgotten and rotting in the corner. ST is developed on Mac and gets all the love it seems.
I just want to say “Linux please!!!!”. Really this is the only piece of software that my Mac has and I wish my Ubuntu station did.
You should maybe consider switching to a Git for Windows version that is actually maintained (hint: there is none) or libgit (https://libgit2.github.com/) or maintain it yourself.
There is an actively maintained version of Git for Windows, called, funnily enough, Git for Windows: https://github.com/git-for-windows/git
That happened only recently after we started being a bit more vocal about it’s state. Good mention though, great that it is finally happening.
(Windows user) Thank you so much for this awesome piece of software !
Great work, guys!
I have a feature request. Not a huge one, but good for keeping up with standards. It would be cool if SourceTree would help recommend the 50/72 char limits in git commit messages. See here for details:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2290016/git-commit-messages-50-72-formatting
Basically, 50 char max for the first line (summary), a blank line after, and then 72 chars per line for full description.
Would love to see a more cleaner interface for Sourcetree. It is already powerful and works great but still simply to overhelming for the sake of its purpose. From UI und UX I much prefer the solution of Github, altough I have problems with commiting BB Repos with it (altough it claims to be able to do it). However, I’m sure you’ve got at least one great designer in your team who might be able to streamline the interface towards a more usable, and easy to use app 😉
linux please
Linux version, please!
Shame about the Linux version not being a priority 🙁 You don’t see many people asking for a .NET version but the people are crying out for a Linux version
All seems very quiet, with not much happening. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed with Sourcetree at all. No blog posts, no tweets, no updates. Nothing….
Linux version please!
So after that huge speech actually nothing happened? Any news here?
Nope, as stagnant as it’s always been…
Very disappointing. Compared to all other Atlassian products (of which we use Stash, Bamboo, JIRA and Conflience), Sourcetree product support really is lousy. It doesn’t feel like customers are in the loop, occasionally we will be thrown a bone.
Please Atlassian, treat this like your other products, not the abysmal way it’s been handled in the past.
Three months over now – and nothing happened (at least with SRCTREEWIN) … The development still seems to stabnate – as it was before this announcement.
We have considered this a dead product and looking at alternatives. Shame, as despite all the Windows bugs, it certainly had promise.
There has been some movement on the beta front, 1.6.15 betas have come out in the last couple of weeks: https://www.sourcetreeapp.com/update/WindowsReleaseNotes_public_beta.html
1.6.16 is out, but it’s a total “meh” release, not adding much in the way of features, not really fixing the serious issues, focusing it seems on the easier ones.
Hi, it is true that the 1.6.x updates are smaller issues. We are working on the larger issues on another branch. Work on that is focusing on refactoring some of the internals at the moment, but we’re aiming to get a preview out soon.
Please please please linux version. I don’t want to use Wine and I cannot afford to buy a product of Mac. I need SourceTree 🙂
Hi Mike, firstly I second all the comments that say great work. I have zero issues with this tool and use it on windows.
For me, what I would like to have are the process improvements that my team’s workflows would get from better integration with ticketing systems.
There are tons of desktop git tools, and I think this one is the best. What there aren’t tons of (any of?) is a non-IDE desktop tool that lets you link git commits with ticket system comments and status updates.
We use JIRA, though I think it would be great if sourcetree continued to be pretty agnostic and had some sort of plugin system for different ticketing systems (and a rock solid JIRA plugin, please 🙂
And what I would love for me and my team to be able to do is to pick a ticket number when doing a commit, and then a ticket status change (if any), and then find that my git commit was annotated with the ticket ID and my ticket status was annotated with my git commit info. And then, of course, I would love to see our bitbucket/stash and JIRA sites have nice links to each other based on that info.
In our version today, we can do some smart text substitution where a link is built from text that matches a ticket ID. But what is not good about this is that the ticket ID can be mistyped (and then the link points to nowhere) and that there isn’t any push to the ticketing system.
The net of it is that we do lots of manual copy-and-paste integration to get our info all linked together. And as you can imagine its not always done correctly, so we do lots of “wtf is this for” and “wtf did you change to do this” when looking over git commits and ticket status updates, respectively.
Pipe dream?
It’s mostly possible. Tickets please stash plugin. Use JIRA to create branch so the stash branch name has the JIRA ticket name in it. Then a commit hook that uses a regex to extract the JIRA ticket from the branch name on comit
Works really well for us. EVERY comit must have a jira
But yes better JIRA integration would be nice. Currently sourcetree is horrible. Even dilly things like a non fixed width font in the comit error dialogue, so it can show stash errors correctly would be a nice start.
Hello! Sorry, where can i download a plain English Source Tree for Mac? The only installation i can find are in Korean / Japanese (?) and i can’t understand anything. ^^
Any tips? 🙂
Five months later… are you still just getting started?Is it time to jump ship and find alternatives?
Indeed, it’s laughable. Atlassian is a name I really trust, they seem to push exactly the right ethics, which is why I find Sourcetree and their project managers to not fit at all with the rest of the portfolio of atlassian products.
If they can’t be bothered to maintain it in a timely fashion (I am restarting Sourcetree for Windows 2 or 3 times every day), they should open source it and allow others to do so…
I know it’s a free tool and all, but the reason we use Sourcetree is because we have BOUGHT stash, jira, bamboo and conflience..
What the hell happened that made you mutilate the use of the checkbox?
The checkboxes are unforgivable.
They sure are. I’ve been using 1.8.x (Mac) for the last couple of years; tried out 2.x again, and was dismayed to find those stupid abused checkboxes still there. Atlassian seems to have some serious problems with competent UX.
Are there any version for Ubuntu ?
It would be nice if someone successful in using SourceTree on Ubuntu using Wine, would share some tips. On Ubuntu 14.04, wine could not carry the installation of SourceTree Windows binary to completion.
After 5 months with no update, this sounds like a bad joke 🙁
Been silent for a while now again… Whats up?!
Would love to see a nice chart showing how many users visit this blog page, desperately waiting for a build that fixes all out problems…
I start using ST on OSX some time ago and loved it. When I start using it on Windows however, it felt like a bad joke 😐 The interface is bad and the bookmark & repository is very weird and out of place, especially when you’re used to the OSX UI and UX. You guys need to rethink this a bit. Also, any plans for Linux support?
Thanks for making a great free product. Your User interface is superb and the PuTTy SSH keys functionality helps me sleep better at night. Hopefully the negative and ridiculous comments in this post will not remove any motivation from the goals you have accomplished. Skol, Attlassian!
Is SourceTree dead?:(
I think so. The last version contained little more than a find and replace from “Stash” to “Bitbucket Server”.
It didn’t address any of the serious issues that users are experiencing daily. (upwards of 5 restarts a day needed here on Sourcetree for Windows with a large VC2005 project).
It’s far from dead, but it took as a little while to ramp up the team. Stay tuned.
Does SourceTree support Git Slave? http://gitslave.sourceforge.net/
Does SourceTree support gitslave? http://gitslave.sourceforge.net/
Linux version would be very much helpfull
Other than two “cheerleading” blog posts since this one, there has been nothing of significance done with SourceTree in over a year.